are you talking about animation layers, which is making animations in layers like in photoshop (allowing very similar things to what you can do with layers in photoshop) and combining them after?

or just which parts to animate first?

for the former, i don't know :P
for the latter, i like to start with feet/legs first. once i have the rhythm i'm happy with, i start in on the hips and the continue working up.
at the same time, i don't do feet/legs 100% then hips 100% etc... i like to iteratively tweak it because it's hard to judge what's a good movement if you can't see the whole thing at once. 

I mean passes, like which bits to work on first and what to do next. Working on the model from the feet up makes sense, just was not sure if I was doing it right or not.

I am assuming it is feet, hips, torso, shoulders, head and finally swinging arms? (layers of stuff to do during a walk animation) 

yeah, i usually do arms last because they're basically secondary movement (movement as a result of).

hips and spine i do all at once, i found the upper spine depends on the hips (how much they sway vs how much upper body is compensating for the sway). 

step by step...

basically i start out and do my leg movements.
this is very rough, little more than the foot going up, then down and pushing backwards.

then, (with IK), i get a little bobbing motion going with the entire body.
at this point, the bobbing up and down is pretty silly and exaggerated.

now i'll try to position the spine in a static pose (for now) in how i generally want the upper body positioned. so if it's a full tilt running, then i bend the spine way forward, otherwise, i mostly just get it into a decent walking position. (maybe hunched over if it's an evil ogre)

at this point, i start to smooth out the feet so that they look as good as i can make it. with IK, hips won't affect it, and i can always tweak later if i have to anyway.

next up will be to get to side to side motion of the COG/center of gravity done and to make the up and down motion more realistic as well.
the side to side motion is important. without it, the animation can look wooden but not immediately obvious why.

now that the COG movement is done, i do the hip tilting and then the spine sway/compensation stuff.

afterwards, assuming everything looks ok, i'll do the upper body rotation (lots for running, very little/none for walking)

finally, i do the arms.

i do the arms last because otherwise, i'll have to keep going back and tweaking them every time i change something in the torso, or anything that affects the torso. (i rarely do IK on hands, although biped has the option to toggle it on and off). 

if you have ne_ruins, open up pak0.pak and open the zombie2.mdl in qme.

i left the oldrun animation sequence in there for some reason. compare oldrun and run for hips/COG swaying. 

I don't have a method of my own, but I do remember learning quite a bit from a tutorial by Paul Steed. Although Paul is probably most fondly remembered for being the driving force behind the Start-To-Crate rating system, archive.org hosts the tutorial:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030621121346/http://www.loonygames.com/content/1.22/totb/index2.shtml
It's a shame the videos are missing but all the images are preservered 

that's pretty cool. shame about the missing animations as i imagine they would really illustrate his points.

i didn't mention it, but his tutorial does on page2: make sure the feet (when on the ground) are on the center line of motion, not just moving forward and back. the overall motion of the foot is more of a very wide arc instead of a line. 

Having a skeletal rig is a good tool for animating models. Takes some time to construckt though.

Made some dynamic turbulence in the waterfall.

http://members.home.nl/gimli/farl.gif 

 

Brilliant!

What's it like with a texture: water, lava, b-l-o-o-d... 

http://members.home.nl/gimli/farlonl.gif 

 

 

that looks better than i thought it would with the texture; even the bottom scrolls. good job. 

That's good, really good. 

http://members.home.nl/gimli/claw.gif 

The water fall is indeed really nice ! Good job !
And the latest one: I'd like to see it textured too ;) 

taniwha of Quakeforge is working on a new mdl exporter for Blender 

I remember writing the last exporter for blender, but abandoned it after the first release as breaking changes left it inoperative in a later version. I suppose abandoned software has stability as it's sole advantage... 

I am trying something like a cell generator, that implies empty cell packs going in and out a machine after having an energy injection.

Fact is I need to translate the cell dimensions, which was 32x32 I thought. The way qmle translates units looks like cm.

Energycells are removeable, while these are solid, which means they have to stay out of reach of the player. 

Shame for the lost triverse in the cell pack.
I have to change the scale anyway.

http://members.home.nl/gimli/clue.gif 

If you want a mdl with scale reference for a cell, dig into the pak2.pak file from quoth and open the pickup.mdl file. It is build to scale. 

I have an example I had from Lunaran, but I lost it somewhere. Thanks for pointing the direction.

I was measuring the frame of qmle into my animation editor, and found that the units compared to centimeters. So for taking 64 x 64 I had my format. When I import a model though it is a giant. I have to scale it ten times before it is usable.

When I modelled the monster in the wall I met the same difficulty. 

It's worth noting that 1 unit in the map editor always corresponds to 1 unit in the QMe editor, which corresponds to 1 unit in the QC, if that is any help for scaling. Most conversion tools just translate one unit in their editor to 1 unit in quake as well, for example the gmax->md3->mdl pathway preserves 1 unit scale at each step. 

Good to know, preach.
I often tried a cube into qmle, but it always fails ingames.

I made a whirlpool, or something in the way.
It could also be udsed as tornado.

http://members.home.nl/gimli/tornad.gif